Celia Rees’s new novel, Sovay, is based on a traditional ballad about a girl who disguises herself as a highwayman to test her lover’s faith. The idea to use the story arose during a conversation with another author.
‘Susan Price is enormously knowledgeable about British folklore and folk ballads,’ says Rees. ‘We were talking about the ballad Sovay and she said, “I love the bit at the end where she says she’d shoot him.You just know she would.”
'And I said “Why don’t I write about her?” The ballad gave me the character and the beginning, but because it’s a narrative in itself I didn’t want it closed ended, so I used half of it, and then everything goes badly wrong and it’s not like the ballad at all. But it was a good starting point.’
In Rees’s novel, Sovay’s suitor is a coward who readily surrenders the ring she has given him, despite having sworn that he would die before parting with it.
When she confronts him afterwards, he rejects her and retaliates by spreading rumours about her father, whose radical politics have caught the attention of the government’s most ruthless spy. Amid an atmosphere of growing fear that the Terror in France will reach British shores, Sovay once again dons her highwayman’s disguise and travels to the heart of the revolution in search of her father.
Rees hesitated before deciding to set Sovay at the height of the revolution, not least because of the sheer level of violence. ‘I thought about it for ages; I shied away from the Grand Terror, as they called it, because it’s so violent. But I thought, “No, I’m going to have to do it. It’s going to have to be there,” and I’m really pleased that I decided to set it right at that point.’
‘That period was so complicated. There were minute-by-minute changes. In Britain, too, the momentum started to move very quickly, with people being arrested and habeas corpus suspended, and draconian acts of parliament brought in very quickly. And I had to match them up with the events in the story.
'That’s why it’s very fast moving; all the events were fast moving, and that was very tricky. I did endless, very detailed timelines and moved the time barriers backwards and forwards in the story. Sometimes there’s a long time historically, but you’ve got nothing to fill it up with. Those things are difficult, but I think in the end I managed to move it about and put things in that account for the time in the novel as well as fitting into the historical time.’
When researching a historical novel, Rees turns to material written at the time as well as contemporary non-fiction about the relevant period.
‘I try to use popular sources like ballads, plays and oral stories, as well as people who wrote at the time like Daniel Defoe, or in this period, the gothic novelists. I’m very interested in how writers writing about their own time reflect the period they’re writing about. And it’s a way of getting to how people thought about things in the past. So I read a lot of novels of people writing at a particular time.’
‘But I also read modern historical non-fiction, and the more modern the better. I’ll go for the latest cutting edge book, because those historians are constantly reinterpreting and reinterpreting the events of the past. Although the story is separate, the historical events control what can happen in the book, what’s possible and not possible.’
As well as an impressive amount of historical detail, a strong gothic streak runs through the novel. At one point Sovay is caught in the clutches of the Order of Illuminati, a sinister group that sacrifices virgins and demands absolute loyalty from its members.
It sounds like pure fabrication, but, sacrificial rituals aside, the Order of the Illuminati really did exist. ‘I like the fact that it sounds completely incredible and Dan Brownish, but it’s true. There was an Order of Illuminati which was started in Germany. Mary Shelley’s Dr Frankenstein studied there.
'It was a kind of philosophical exchange club to start with, but it did start having secret meetings, like the masons. It was banned in Bavaria, and they had Orders in America. Jefferson belonged to one.’
Rees’s Illuminati meet at the mansion of the spy, Dysart; the abbey she creates is modelled on a real building. ‘Fonthill Abbey was built by Edward Beckford, who was a gothic novelist and immensely wealthy. It all fell down.
'The French revolution was also the time of the Gothic novel - The Mysteries of Udolpho was published in 1794. Then I saw a Channel 4 programme about lost buildings, and this was one of them. It was an immense folly. There was a bit of an original abbey inside. It was huge, 300ft high. He had a dwarf opening the door to make it look bigger, just like in the book.’
Rees brings out a pile of images that helped her to visualise her story when she was writing the book. On one page is a photocopy of a painting of Fonthill Abbey. On another is Delacroix’s painting of the French revolution, “Liberty Guiding the People”.
‘This is Mary Wollstonecraft, always a reminder that there were exceptional and extraordinary women at the time; these Gillray cartoons graphically describe what people thought might happen if the French revolution moved to Britain. All of these things feed into the book. They’re more important than the dry history, the facts. I bought this tricoleur in a costumiers in Paris. I put this on when I talk to kids at schools. I find it very useful.’
On her school visits, Rees finds that once she starts talking about the French Revolution itself, even the boys are hooked, despite the fact that the hero of the novel is a girl. ‘I try to get them to think about things that we take for granted, like human rights. What do these things mean: liberty, equality, fraternity? What did they mean to people then? Why did they fight and die for them? Why did it all go so horribly wrong? And that’s why I’ve got these Gillray cartoons, because they’re quite graphic, and shocking.
'This is what people thought would happen here. It would be like if you had al-Qaida over the Channel taking over the country; that’s how scary it would have been. I think you’ve got to feel the fear. When I talk about freedom, they’re very interested in that. They know it’s important and they know what it means. And they are shocked by the violence, by the terror and the horror of it. That seems to be getting through to them. It’s a way to get people to see the human side of it.’
